Back in 2005 I was working in Terrassa, Spain, at the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya. I had a wonderfull time there working on my graduation project for electrotechnical engineering. Together with Fons Pijpers we were doing research on the use of chaotic electric signals for encrypting telecommunication signals. Chaotic you say? Isn’t chaos something you definitely do not want in your circuits? Well Leon O. Chua designed something that is still known under his name, the Chua circuit. A Chua circuit is a circuit which exhibits a chaotic electrical signal. Those who know more about the chaos theory or have seen movies like ‘the butterfly effect’ understand that chaos is very different from random garbage. Whithout going into too much detail on the chaos, what me and Fons did there was to try and synchronise two of these chaotic signals by means of electrical coupling. We then tried to use this signal a carrier and modulate it with a digital signal. The point is that if you don’t understand the carrier (it appears random, like garbage), you can’t lock on to it and thus cannot demodulate the data. Hence it is encrypted.

I’d like to make our work available here, to a broader public than just the UPC students. If you find it usefull in any way please be so kind to drop me a line.